Days Gone review roundup, unremarkable survival experience

Reviews for SIE Bend Studio's zombie survival game Days Gone are in and not many seem impressed. Ranging from disjointed and meaningless narratives to tedious, chore-like missions, there aren't many things that set Days Gone apart.

Kotaku wrote, "Days Gone displays little that reaches beyond its many influences and contemporaries, instead settling for being a hollow simulacrum of them all."

They were quite impressed with hordes, which seem to be to everyone's liking by the way, but their opinion of the game's narrative was pretty low.

Eurogamer is of a similar opinion, insisting that already from the story's defining moment, things just make very little sense.

"Days Gone carries with it the expectation that if you cobble a game together from parts of other games that are already massively successful, you'll have yourself a winner, but it has no awareness of why these games were successful, or simply no means to replicate them", they concluded.

Destructoid, on the other hand, found themselves engaged with the story, but found that Days Gone's mechanical parts are often inconsistent with it, with the game giving you unlimited fuel on some missions.

"It's almost like the team knew that it wasn't a very fun thing to micromanage in a game with a massive open world and used a stopgap solution when they needed to move the narrative along", they said. They scored it with a 6/10.

IGN also thought this made Days Gone's world inconsistent, ultimately resulting in a game that feels like it's bloated and unnecessarily long.

"There's a good game in here somewhere, but it's buried in a meandering storyline, repetitive missions, and just too much obligatory stuff to do without an eye on the smaller details that could have given it much more character", they wrote.

Gamespot also complained about stories and missions that have absolutely no bearing in the long run.

"Narrative threads are dropped as soon as Deacon no longer has a use for them. Copeland and Tucker only matter until Deacon gets to a camp that has better supplies. Boozer's health is only important because it's Deacon's reason for living", they wrote, scoring it with a 5.

Sony
Days Gone, c'mon dude, we just want an autograph!

The Verge thought that the game is not very fun, but more like a giant to-do list, with very little variety. "There isn't anything here you can't experience in other, better games", they said. They thought that Deacon's bike is pretty great though, as well as the zombie hordes.

At the moment, Days Gone has a score of 72 on Metacritic, so the game is obviously far from a disaster - it's a solid game, with a few bugs here and there that should be addressed. However, it's safe to say that we expected a bit more than just solid.